Me too, except porridge ('oatmeal') when we had it (my family and I when I was young) was always doused with multiple heaped table spoons of brown sugar. Twas never bland! I now recognise why I was so thirsty afterward- not only oats but the huge amount of sugar!

Haha yes whenever I see the Kashi cereals that have the cereal in an egg-shaped bowl that say "as much protein as an egg" on the box/ in the ads I always think to myself, "You'd be better off just eating a real egg, ye numpties!"

I ate pretty much the same thing during my apex of competition. A bowl of cooked Steel cut oats with mandarin oranges and raisins, two scoops of vanilla protein powder (and a tablespoon of orange metamucil added to it), 6 egg whites and 3 whole eggs scrambled with cheese. Glass of milk to wash it down. A muscle milk before lunch. Don't miss those days at all...

I was also an overweight preteen. 168 lb. at age 13. I lost weight when they invented Diet Coke, up to 8 cans a day, and low-calorie dieting--a popsicle ("fruit-and-juice bar") for breakfast and a can of Campbell's soup for lunch, then whatever my margarine-loving mom fixed for dinner. It worked but looking back, it's so sad. At 41 I'm worried about osteoporosis from all that dieting.

Don't you love looking at someone's cart in the grocery store and seeing the same junk that the SAD-eating person in front of them has in theirs, except that this person has 'dressed up' all that grain, sugar, soy, etc. into nice flashy 'organic and healthy' versions

I have never heard of that site so I went to look. Isn't Hungry "girl" a little too old to be calling herself a "girl" still? Or does hungry pre-menopausal woman not sound as fun? How about Hungry Cougar?

HAAA, boneless skinless poultry breast. I'm so glad I've "seen the light" in regards to that. So many of my friends prefer it on a taste level though and that's.. such a mystery to me? I've always preferred the dark meat and skin; even when I thought it was bad for me I just couldn't kid myself :P

In grad school I thought a can of Diet Coke and a frosted cinnamon Pop-Tart was a good breakfast because it only had 200 calories! I always had burritos in the freezer because they were fast, hot and beans are good for you, right? Shouldn't people in grad school be smarter than that??

I had mountains of Kashai cereal for breakfast in my iron worker days, thought I was hot stuff too. The gas it gave me would chase filthy construction guys off a roof, even in high winds, twenty yards away.The funny thing about stew made of beef feet, mostly under cooked liver and homemade kraut is that it stopped horrible gas,

I know, you guys, I can't believe I ever thought any of that looked appetizing! I remember I sent in a suggestion that she use splenda with a bit of molasses in place of the brown sugar in her recipes and being annoyed that she didn't post it... I was warped! And I think she's hungry all the time because it's been years since she's eaten real food. I mean, the gal even manages to ruin burgers! hungry-girl.com/chew/show/2233

I know, guys I can't believe I ever thought any of that looked appetizing! I remember I sent in a suggestion that she use splenda with a bit of molasses in place of the brown sugar in her recipes and being annoyed that she didn't post it. I was warped! And I think she's hungry all the time because it's been years since she's eaten real food. I mean, the gal even manages to ruin burgers! http://www.hungry-girl.com/chew/show/2233

Ugh, TVP, I forgot all about that! I used to gorge on the stuff. In the morning it found its way into my oatmeal to bump up the protein content, in the evenings it was dessert when mixed with 0% fat greek yogurt and stevia. Plain spoonfuls of it cause I was starving and didn't know what else to eat. Thanks for reminding me about that junk!!!

Thanks to Hungry Girl I was eating Boca burgers on Sandwich Thins and obsessively measuring out 1/2 cup servings of Fage 0% with a packet of Splenda and a few pumps of Torani sugar-free syrup mixed in for "dessert". I thought I was eating healthy. All I was doing was ruining my health and buying into clever marketing.

I know what you mean about the being satiated thing! And those Hungry Girl recipes are awful, its like they were actually tailored for starving people with eating disorders. The whole obsession with desserts seems really unbalanced to me- I know when I was a binge eater, besides the sugar, it was an underlying craving for fat that drove me to it...

thank you for informing about this, I didn`t know about this danger. I`ve been eating canned mackrell in tomatoe on a daily basis the last months. So I guess I have to say bye bye to the canned mackrell as well then..

I definitely feel you on the plain bread being healthy. I was maybe 15 when I was eating ketchup and white bread because it had no meat and was nearly-fat free, thinking it was healthy. No worries, I didn't flinch at your story about plastic bags and thinking it would melt fat. I just share the same pain and remember the misery! When I was 15, I also drank CHOCOALTE MILKSHAKES for lunch, because I thought it was similar to Slim-fast.
Kashi bars and luna bars...I've been there too! OHhhh, a vegetarian soy protein source. Hooray! Not.

+1 for the hard work. I taught myself how to bake bread and even came up with my own special, healthy recipes, and I often ponder what I could have done with the immense amount of time and energy I wasted on them.

+1 for the hard work. I taught myself how to bake bread and even came up with my own special, healthy recipes, and I often ponder what I could have done with the immense amount of time I wasted on them.

I used to eat reduced calorie whole grain bread...and I went through a gluten phase too (in the form of seitan for protein). And ditto on the soy nuts, roasted...I also ate lots of other soy products like boca burgers, crumbles, and bars.

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I used to spend hours making whole grain breads, packed with as much wheat germ, vital gluten flour, seeds, and nuts I could cram in there. In spite of the stomach cramps, crushing hunger, brain fog, and declining grades that resulted I was convinced that it was healthy and just needed to eat more of it to adjust to the extra fiber load. It sucks knowing how hard I worked to cause a leaky gut.

Also thought Diet Coke, soy nuts, and margarine were good for me at one point.

I used to eat reduced calorie whole grain bread...and I went through a gluten phase too (in the form of seitan for protein). And ditto on the soy nuts, roasted...I also ate lots of other soy products like boca burgers, crumbles, and bars.

+1 for the hard work. I taught myself how to bake bread and even came up with my own special, healthy recipes, and I often ponder what I could have done with the immense amount of time I wasted on them.

+1 for the hard work. I taught myself how to bake bread and even came up with my own special, healthy recipes, and I often ponder what I could have done with the immense amount of time and energy I wasted on them.

I tried to convince my family to use margarine instead of butter. Got to the point where my brother started disliking butter, he would only put margarine on his veggies or he wouldn't eat them.

When I became paleo and started eating butter again and asked my mom what she thought, she said that when I was a margarine eating vegetarian she wanted to make me eat on the deck with the dog. She hated cooking separate meals for me, and she always thought margarine was bullshit. Could have used that tough love before I became vegetarian!

I had mountains of Kashai cereal for breakfast in my iron worker days, thought I was hot stuff too. The gas it gave me would chase filthy construction guys off a roof, even in high winds, twenty yards away.The funny thing about stew made of beef feet, mostly under cooked liver and homemade kraut is that it stopped horrible gas,

I shudder to think of all the breakfast cereals. On the rare occasion I go down those aisles, I laugh at how much time I used to spend there debating which one was better. It's painfully obvious to me now that they're all made with the same dust and water as all the rest. I actually used to eat chocolate cereal for dessert, thinking it was better than a cookie since it was so low fat.

I used crystallized fructose rather than white sugar in apple pies because it was "healthy." I made my own whole grain, cracked wheat bread. I went low fat for a while, until my skin started to hurt all over and I realized I had to have more fat--and then I used "healthy" vegetable oils. It's probably a good thing I decided I liked the taste of grapeseed oil because I probably could have done worse.

I ate a lot of boneless, skinless turkey breast--and to this day I refuse to eat that any more. I eat dark meat and skin, but breast meat has to be drowned in butter before I'll look at it.

HAAA, boneless skinless poultry breast. I'm so glad I've "seen the light" in regards to that. So many of my friends prefer it on a taste level though and that's.. such a mystery to me? I've always preferred the dark meat and skin; even when I thought it was bad for me I just couldn't kid myself :P

TONS of rice. I used to put small amounts of chinese food over scads of rice, figuring that the low fat rice was way healthier than the greasy chinese food. Actually, probably both were pretty terrible :)

Before I switched to a "clean" diet, I ate a lot of artificial sweeteners, low-fat/sugar-free processed foods and tons of Jif crunchy peanut butter, diet soda and Quaker cinnamon roll oatmeal packets. I was really into Hungry Girl recipes at the time, because healthy to me was "fewer calories" rather than "more nutrition".
After banning processed foods, and later becoming a vegetarian and then a vegan, I ate the crap out of oatmeal (especially oat bran), homemade whole grain bread, homemade bran muffins, all-natural peanut butter, homemade hummus (in fact my first foray into a paleo-ized recipe was making cauliflower hummus, which turned out gross because I refused to use the "massive" amount of olive oil it called for), soy and wheat proteins, whole wheat pasta, tons of fruit, canola and rice bran oils for cooking, "light" bread which was really just overpriced regular bread cut smaller, all pulses, bulgur, barley, tofu smoothies, Quorn products (before I went vegan), quinoa, brown rice, agave, Earth Balance fake butter, nutritional yeast (which I still eat, but I would literally eat 1/4 - 1/2 cup of the stuff at a time to make up for my vitamin-deficient diet) and white whole wheat pastry flour.

It's kind of funny to me that I decided that it was good that I didn't fit animal products in my diet because they were too high in calories and fat, when they were the only things that ever satiated me. On my previous diet I got hunger pains every 60-90 minutes and it was a fantastic feat if I ever made it 3 hours without eating. I'm still amazed whenever I realize that I haven't eaten in 6 hours and am not even hungry.

I know, you guys, I can't believe I ever thought any of that looked appetizing! I remember I sent in a suggestion that she use splenda with a bit of molasses in place of the brown sugar in her recipes and being annoyed that she didn't post it... I was warped! And I think she's hungry all the time because it's been years since she's eaten real food. I mean, the gal even manages to ruin burgers! hungry-girl.com/chew/show/2233

Thanks to Hungry Girl I was eating Boca burgers on Sandwich Thins and obsessively measuring out 1/2 cup servings of Fage 0% with a packet of Splenda and a few pumps of Torani sugar-free syrup mixed in for "dessert". I thought I was eating healthy. All I was doing was ruining my health and buying into clever marketing.

I know what you mean about the being satiated thing! And those Hungry Girl recipes are awful, its like they were actually tailored for starving people with eating disorders. The whole obsession with desserts seems really unbalanced to me- I know when I was a binge eater, besides the sugar, it was an underlying craving for fat that drove me to it...

I know, guys I can't believe I ever thought any of that looked appetizing! I remember I sent in a suggestion that she use splenda with a bit of molasses in place of the brown sugar in her recipes and being annoyed that she didn't post it. I was warped! And I think she's hungry all the time because it's been years since she's eaten real food. I mean, the gal even manages to ruin burgers! http://www.hungry-girl.com/chew/show/2233

Oat porridge! Had it every day for breakfast for ten years...
Beans and lentils. Ignored the fact that I looked like I was pregnant in 5. month every time I ate it. Still thought it was healthy for some reason..

As a vegetarian for 10 years, I ate and defended soy sausages, schnitzels, hot dogs and not-bacon. I would even try and force my meat eating family to have them, and couldn't understand why they wouldn't give up their real meat.

Fat-free mayonnaise and fat-free cream cheese (aka "spackle"). Fake-meat products. Steel-cut oats (which to this day I still find appetizing, drowned in butter, brown sugar and cinnamon! But I daren't). Glue-y fat-free dressing on ginormous salads with whole-grain croutons and a can of cheap tuna. Soy milk/cheese/bacon/tofu/chips/snax. N-grain breads that, texturally, were made with crushed gravel and iron pellets. Heaps of slithery whole-wheat pasta doused with fat-free sugary sauces with a little bit of turkey sausage. Egg whites cooked in PAM. Heart-healthy canola oil. Pots of 12-bean soups made with fat-free industrial chicken broth and a fat-free turkey kielbasa for a little flavor.

I have never heard of that site so I went to look. Isn't Hungry "girl" a little too old to be calling herself a "girl" still? Or does hungry pre-menopausal woman not sound as fun? How about Hungry Cougar?

My go-to healthy meal was sprouted toast with a Boca burger, organic
Ketchup, a small amount of canola mayonnaise, with a side of edamame, an apple, and maybe some hummus and veggies.

Another favorite healthy meal I used to make was Barilla Plus pasta (pasta with extra flaxseed meal, Multi grains, and lentils) with a jar of
Pasta sauce (probably with soy oil in it) mixed with a mixture of ground turkey and
Veggie "meat" crumbles. With a salad with bottled dressing. Hahahahaha

Oh, and I started many a morning with a giant bowl of kashi go-lean with 2% milk or rice milk.

I also used splenda in everything and use natural
Balance soy-free margarine or olivio spread.

Flaxseed oil. I'd read somewhere that it was soooo good for you. I would add 2 tablespoons of it to my smoothie each morning until I suddenly had a whopping great goitre popping out of my neck. Only then did I do more research and find out how goitrogenic it is. I cringe at the thought now, though it did start me on my quest to eventually find the paleo way of life.

I was actually tried low fat diets, I was a vegan for 5 months, and tried some other fads when I was seeing a reproductive endocrinologist to try to have a baby after they suggested I try to lose some weight....needless to say it didn't work. I didn't get pregnant, until I gave up and started eating what I wanted (which ultimately looks almost exactly like a paleo diet).

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with reduced fat cape cod potato chips and a glass or 2, or 3 of 1/2% milk.

Kashi cereals
gluten free cereal
canned soup
corn because I thought it was a veggie
Total and Wheaties cereal
100% Whole Wheat Bread
Spaghetti
imitation meat foods that are mostly made up of soy protein isolate and gluten (yikes!)

When I was an over-weight kid, about 12, and trying to be thin, I would eat about 6 slices of plain bread toasted with margarine on it, and crackers with margarine, and wore plastic bags over my abdomen while I ran on the treadmill for an hour, "burning the fat away".

I definitely feel you on the plain bread being healthy. I was maybe 15 when I was eating ketchup and white bread because it had no meat and was nearly-fat free, thinking it was healthy. No worries, I didn't flinch at your story about plastic bags and thinking it would melt fat. I just share the same pain and remember the misery! When I was 15, I also drank CHOCOALTE MILKSHAKES for lunch, because I thought it was similar to Slim-fast.
Kashi bars and luna bars...I've been there too! OHhhh, a vegetarian soy protein source. Hooray! Not.

I was also an overweight preteen. 168 lb. at age 13. I lost weight when they invented Diet Coke, up to 8 cans a day, and low-calorie dieting--a popsicle ("fruit-and-juice bar") for breakfast and a can of Campbell's soup for lunch, then whatever my margarine-loving mom fixed for dinner. It worked but looking back, it's so sad. At 41 I'm worried about osteoporosis from all that dieting.

Another vote for those loaves of crunchy, thick-crusted, chewy peasant-style whole-wheat artisan breads ... I think the only thing really healthy was the amount of extra-virgin olive oil I drizzled on top ...

I was a soymilk-aholic and a tofu-holic and a soy-yogurt-holic, I made rice (both brown and white) almost every day, I would have salads with boneless skinless white meat chicken on top (which, is, acutally, when you think about it, paleo) because it had no fat and I thought fat was evil, even though I would feel really tired and woozy after having it for lunch, non-hydrogenated vegetable shortening was a must-have for baking

Man, a big part of my gripe with the big health magazines out there is the fact that they peddle malnutrition as the means to a healthy life (though I was more concerned with the physique back when I referred to them as my one-stop-shop).

As a result, Men's Health, Men's Fitness & Muscle & Development had me on a steady diet of:

oatmeal

lean meats (mainly turkey)

peanut butter (I would genuinely by this stuff by the kilogram, no
exaggeration and consume ONLY THIS
over the course of 2 days... now THAT
was nuts)

canned tuna

cottage cheese

whole wheat bread

lentils, beans (I thank God I found paleo before 4HB - ugh)

I'm sure there were other goofy things, but those were the main one's which I reflect on and shake my head at periodically. Not to say that all of these are bad, just that I'd prefer a steak - fat and all - with some grilled squash, kale and avocado any day of week. I'm certainly much happier and human with the latter.

Fortunately I've never cared much for artificial sweeteners (they all tasted awful to me) and I have always distrusted anything that said "fat free" when it was clearly MEANT to have fat in it, even before I knew why it deserves to be distrusted.

I seriously ate like crap for a long, long time. Although diet #2 probably looks healthy to most folks (outside the paleosphere) I felt just as crappy eating that stuff as I did when I was eating my way through the junk food aisle. It wasn't until I started down a primal eating path that I began feeling good, for the first time in 17 years.

Haha yes whenever I see the Kashi cereals that have the cereal in an egg-shaped bowl that say "as much protein as an egg" on the box/ in the ads I always think to myself, "You'd be better off just eating a real egg, ye numpties!"

I ate pretty much the same thing during my apex of competition. A bowl of cooked Steel cut oats with mandarin oranges and raisins, two scoops of vanilla protein powder (and a tablespoon of orange metamucil added to it), 6 egg whites and 3 whole eggs scrambled with cheese. Glass of milk to wash it down. A muscle milk before lunch. Don't miss those days at all...

EGG WHITES... never the yolk because of all the naughty cholestrol. I also used to trim the entire outside of the chicken breast off so I could be sure I trimmed off the fat, I would be left with this dry wimpy sliver of chicken, maybe 2 ounces and that was dinner!

Canola oil (so glad to see that go, you don't even know. It made everything soggy and what I remember of the taste is pretty gross), beans and whole wheat bread too... Nothing really crazy, just the most common SHAD recommendations, and I so like my new version of "healthy" much better. At least it's actually do-able; "Healthy" used to be such a daunting, boring word that I didn't even adhere to it most of the time!

In my 20s when I was working and on my own for the first time, my most healthful dinenr was a giant bowl of angel hair pasta mixed with tomato sauce and cooked spinach - 3 things I would never touch right now. (I love tomato and spinach and don't dispute them being good vegetables, but both currently disagree with me a lot.) Since I cooked it with zero fat (because I wanted to be HEALTHY) I was never full and would keep refilling my bowl.

Hummus with pita chips, lentils, brown rice pasta, whole wheat bread, fat-free yogurt, canola oil, splenda, the usual suspects! :) I had such a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea of legumes not being the healthiest thing on the planet, but eating kidney beans after having eliminating them for a few months set me straight right quick! The day after, I felt like I'd eaten a giant donut.

I ate a traditional bodybuilding diet including low fat, high protein and high carb spread out over 7-8 meals a day.....because of course we need to keep that metabolism going..lol. I also used to little pound the fiber. Fiber cereal, fiber supplements, extra fiber whole wheat bread, tons of pinto beans, etc. I probably ate 75-100 grams of fiber a day. No wonder I had IBS.

I started eating oatmeal because it was a healthy breakfast, even though I would nearly gag at the bland taste and horrible texture. I had to buy flavored types or add tons of fruit to be able to eat it. So glad I got over that one!

Yogurt. It's fine for some, but it messes up my stomach, yet I've tried repeatedly to consume it because it's "healthy" and good for my digestion (despite the stomach cramps??).

Total/Special K cereal. I used these to get all my daily vitamins. Of course, I couldn't stand either unless I sprinkled in sugar and added other things for flavor.

Beans. I don't like beans, but I always saw them as a way to up my vegetable count for the day. Now I'm happy to bypass them.

Whole grains. I've never been big on breads, but when whole-wheat pasta got popular I was all over that!

Me too, except porridge ('oatmeal') when we had it (my family and I when I was young) was always doused with multiple heaped table spoons of brown sugar. Twas never bland! I now recognise why I was so thirsty afterward- not only oats but the huge amount of sugar!

As a vegan, the usual culprits: oatmeal, blueberries and flax every morning, big servings of legumes, brown rice, falafel, almond butter by the tablespoons, quinoa, lived off fruit (the gateway drug to nutella binges), soy and rice milk over dairy, tempeh, those vegan chocolates that have twice the sugar content but no dairy, wholegrain bread (family is still convinced this is the key to good health), alternative sugars and vegetable oils.

Oh, I nearly forgot my foray into textured vegetable protein- a can of gluggy tasteless paste that resembled mince. I was so excited to eat it and be so super healthy for having a suitable meat alternative. Needless to say, it didn't make me feel any better.

Why do we do this to ourselves? I'll swear here and now that I won't ever continue eating something if it makes me feel rubbish, in the name of 'health'.

Ugh, TVP, I forgot all about that! I used to gorge on the stuff. In the morning it found its way into my oatmeal to bump up the protein content, in the evenings it was dessert when mixed with 0% fat greek yogurt and stevia. Plain spoonfuls of it cause I was starving and didn't know what else to eat. Thanks for reminding me about that junk!!!

you'd think that the fact i'd wake up in the middle of the night RAVENOUS and making concoctions of sweet potato and coconut milk would have given me a hint as to the fact that i was not eating enough for my activity level. interestingly, i remained at the high end of the "healthy" weight range.

Mine wasn't so much eating "healthy" foods... It was eating "unhealthy" foods, i used to feel guilty eating bacon sausage & egg sometimes twice a day! My love of meat & eggs overrode my health concerns (heart attack/cholesterol) My overweight work colleagues use to ask where i put it all whilst they munched on their "healthy" sandwiches. Now i know why i was so lean!

i thought that all fruits are healthy and you can eat as much as you want.i ate 3-6 apples a day in past lefe and thought that it will help me to be healthy and weight less.but now i know that it's just the same as pure table sugar.(because our body doesn't care what type of sugar you consume,it will store it as fat because nobody needs that much glucose)

For lunch almost every day at work I went to Potbelly's and ordered off the "lite" menu. I usually got the mushroom melt on whole wheat bread with cheese, lettuce, hot peppers, mustard, and "just a little bit" of mayo. The sandwich was always accompanied by a Diet Coke that I would return to the store to refill multiple times.

Non organic norweigian salmon, turns out they spray the whole fish ponds with pesti ides and antibiotics. The fish eat food made from other fish and grains instead of plancton. Basically no omega 3 but filled with artificial shit. unfortunately is hard to get hold of nord Atlantic salmon here and when you do find it it's about $50 for a kilo.

Before working out, I would often do a clif bar with a processed meat wheat sandwich with cheese, along with a fast food fruit smoothie with whey protein. On a food allergy test, I showed a sensitivity to whey and nuts, and I’m now noticing that I have a lactose intolerance and benefit from a gluten-free diet. By trying to eat “healthy” I had created my most inflammatory combination of foods.

Before paleo I was vegetarian for 5 years. I ate tonnes of brown rice, wholegrain bread, bags of salted and roasted peanuts, hommus, tofu, soy milk and "natural" peanut butter, not to mention I ate a bowl of oatmeal every morning for years without fail drenched honey. One of my staples was brown rice and beans. I thought all of the was healthy and I was smug about it.

How wrong was I.

Then late last year I finally decided to look at my diet and attempt to fix the terrible damage I had done surviving on those "foods". Haven't looked back since.

i ate quite healthy before paleo, all organic meats and produce, no refined sugar etc. pretty much paleo with lots of grains nuts and seeds. at the time thought i was pretty knowledgeable on the subject and id always go off about quinoa and hemp seeds to my friends and family. once i started researching paleo view points i soon learned that they were adequate at best foods, and was crushed haha.

also bought into the whole avacado oil has a high smoke point thing that some places claim. Spent way too much money on an oil that only ended up oxidized once cooked.

thank you for informing about this, I didn`t know about this danger. I`ve been eating canned mackrell in tomatoe on a daily basis the last months. So I guess I have to say bye bye to the canned mackrell as well then..